“From this primitive function has arisen, unquestionably, all the forms and ceremonials of modern church and state, for through all the countless ages, back beyond the last uttermost ramparts of a dawning humanity our fierce, hairy forebears danced out the rites of the Dum-Dum to the sound of their earthen drums, beneath the bright light of a tropical moon in the depth of a mighty jungle which stands unchanged today as it stood on that long forgotten night in the dim, unthinkable vistas of the long dead past when our first shaggy ancestor swung from a swaying bough and dropped lightly upon the soft turf of the first meeting place.”

A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain (and SFBRP #151), Edgar Allan Poe should be read aloud, The Return Of Tarzan, racism, Esmeralda, Gone With The Wind, minstrel shows, Chicago, Arizona, the mammy archetype, radio drama racism, Jar Jar Binks, Star Wars: Episode III, October 1912, historical dialect, Jane (the white lady), “you just shot a woman in the head”, cannibalism, Conan Tarzan lynches his mother’s killer, rope tricks, out of context vs. in context, Tarzan as a god, Ballantine Books, the dum-dum scholars, Project Gutenberg edition, ERB Incorporated, Tarzan The Censored by Jerry L. Schneider, Tarzan Of The Apes censorship and “improvements” since the original publication, “an English grammar Nazi”, The Heathen by Jack London, taking out or changing a few words can hurt the story, Earnest Hemingway and William Shakespeare are “too wordy”, Tab Cola, Tarzan’s relationship with the cannibal villagers, “mankind and civilization aren’t”, colonialism, the Belgian Congo, King Leopold II, contemplating cannibalism, “the white god of the woods”, Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984), Wisconsin, Tarzan’s ape father is driven away by Kerchak (and turned into a museum exhibit), “the Evil village of Scotland”, the sadness that comes with the deaths is powerful, Paul D’Arno, Obi Wan Kenobi, “Tarzan was the blockbuster hit of the twentieth century”, A Princess Of Mars, Ruritania, The Mad King, “complete in one issue”, All-Story, the scanty Science Fiction elements, feral children, Romulus and Remus, Mowgli, Tarzan is a wild child, “this line from a book”, all of Burroughs characters are excellent language learners, when Tarzan writes a note, Lord Of The Jungle (Dynamite Entertainment), the mistaken dual identity, “Jane has massive bosoms”, Green Mansions (starring Rima, The Jungle Girl), Johnny Weissmuller, “the Sheena of South America”, Audrey Hepburn and Anthony Perkins, Psycho, significantly more significant, the primary driver of fiction of this period is character, Nancy Drew, book serials, Rudyard Kipling dissed Burroughs’ writing and grammar, White Fang is kind of like Tarzan Of The Apes, first person vs. third person, you can’t admire the character from afar if the story is told first person, Sherlock Holmes, “that turn towards character is a turn towards the third person omniscient POV”, “that heroic distance” (1910-1950), Raymond Chandler, “I read Chandler”, Tarzan is the only Burroughs series that doesn’t turn to first person narration, John Carter’s character, why is Tarzan such a big character, Tarzan Alive: A Definitive Biography Of Lord Greystoke by Philip José Farmer, Tarzan as a quiet sophisticate, Doc Savage, The Green Odyssey by Philip José Farmer, Farmer is a fan of character, a stranger in a strange land, what ruined Julie for religion, The Mastermind Of Mars (is PUBLIC DOMAIN), “Tur is Tur.”, copyright, copyfight, jungle Tarzan vs. cafe absinthe drinking Tarzan, “the machine”, the Weissmuller Tarzan, where does he get his razor?, “that knife was his father”, “next book please”, Tarzan And His Mate , “lots of wet people”, “skin friendly”, melon-farmer vs. motherfucker, Boy and Cheeta are Hollywood, Scrappy-do, what did Tantor have to say?, Sabor the lioness, “there are no tigers in Africa, Ed”, Crocodile Dundee, Beyond Thirty, The Mucker, yellow peril looking dudes, The Girl From Hollywood, The Man Eater, early road trips, The Land That Time Forgot, The Lost World, the Caspak series, WWI, “sheer headlong adventure”, The Asylum, closing words, “it’s not what you think”, “really really good fun”, baby ape skeleton in the cradle, a classic of writing, a touching story, “and vengeance is his”, serialization in newspapers, cliffhangers, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins,

CBC’s Day 6 blog has a lengthy, November 1985, interview Ray Bradbury (conducted by Vicky Gabereau for her self titled Gabereau show). This is a terrific long-form and ramblingly awesome interview – as Bradbury himself puts it, it’s a “discussion about ideas.”

In it Bradbury talks about:
Moving out to California as a kid, how he gets around Los Angeles, his appearance on Groucho Marx’s You Bet Your Life, movies, directing vs. writing, Fahrenheit 451, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald, James M. Cain, Norman Mailer, a discussion about ideas, bad male drivers, Blackstone the magician, Paris, France, the American Revolutionary War, architecture, Federico Fellini, Amarcord (1973), horror movies, The Fog Horn, The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, Godzilla, dinosaurs, Moby Dick, William Shakespeare, John Houston, The Carrot People, The Horror Of Dracula, Christopher Lee, The Omen, Diabolique, Jean Harlow, Burns and Allen, The Trojans and sporadically his then current novel Death Is A Lonely Business.

And here’s that appearance on You Bet Your Life (featuring Ray Bradbury in a crew cut):

And now that it is I’ll be sure to be watching for the complete torrent for this great sounding new BBC Radio 4 production of The Long Goodbye (it begins tomorrow)!

The Saturday Play – The Long Goodbye
Adapted from the novel by Raymond Chandler; Performed by a full cast
4 Parts – Approx. [RADIO DRAMA]
Broadcaster: BBC Radio 4
Broadcast: October 1, 2011 – 14:30-16:00Toby Stephens is back as Raymond Chandler’s fast-talking private eye Philip Marlowe. This is California in the 50’s, as beautiful as a ripe fruit and rotten to the core, reflecting all the tarnished glitter of the American Dream. Outside a club on Sunset Boulevard Marlowe meets a drunk named Terry Lennox, a man with scars on one side of his face. They forge an uneasy friendship but everything changes when Lennox shows up late one night, asking for a favour.

The Radio Times has a picked a new play set to air on February 4th, 2010 in BBC Radio 4’s Afternoon Play slot. It’ll be a curious dramatization of the real life collaboration between Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler while working on the screen adaptation of James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity!

This will be part of a series of BBC Radio dramatisations of all Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novels. Toby Stephens will be playing Philip Marlowe throughout (see more details at the bottom of this post).

Double Jeopardy
By Stephen Wyatt; Directed by Claire Grove; Performed by a full cast
1 Broadcast – Approx. 1 Hour [RADIO DRAMA]In 1944 Raymond Chandler (Patrick Stewart) and Billy Wilder (Adrian Scarborough) work on a screen adaptation of James M. Cain’s novel Double Indemnity. Billy Wilder is a 36-year-old German Jewish émigré just making his name as a director and Raymond Chandler is a reformed alcoholic with a developing reputation as a novelist – but absolutely no experience of writing for the movies.

Other Raymond Chandler treats airing on BBC Radio 4 include:

Feature: A Coat, A Hat and A Gun
11.30am-noon, Thursday 3 February 2011Harriett Gilbert presents a reappraisal of the life and legacy of the man from Upper Norwood who invented the private investigator as we know him. “I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun.” Philip Marlowe has become the archetypal American detective anti-hero, yet his creator was educated at English public school, took the Civil Service exam and started a career in the Admiralty. With contributions from writer Sarah Dunant, Professor John Sutherland, David Thomson, and David Fine. Producer Rebecca Stratford.

Saturday Play: The Lady In The Lake
Saturday 12 February 2011, 2.30-4.00pmDerace Kingsley (Sam Dale), a wealthy businessman, hires Philip Marlowe to find his estranged wife Crystal. Kingsley fears that rich, reckless Crystal may have got herself into a scandal and the last place she was known to have been was a resort called Little Fawn Lake. Dramatised by Stephen Wyatt; director Claire Grove.

Saturday Play: Farewell My Lovely
Saturday 19 February 2011, 2.30-4.00pmWhen Philip Marlowe sees a huge, loudly dressed man casually throwing a bouncer out onto the the pavement as he goes into a bar, he knows it’s time to walk away, so he follows him inside. The big guy is Moose Molloy (Richard Ridings), recently released from an eight-year prison sentence and now on the hunt for his old sweetheart, a red-haired nightclub singer named Velma Valento. Marlowe follows a trail which includes a stick-up, blackmail, an irresistible blonde, a psychic, drugs and murder, and it leads him all the way to the top of a corrupt state of California. Dramatised by Robin Brooks; director Mary Peate.

Saturday Play: Playback
Saturday 26 February 2.30-3.30pmPhilip Marlowe is hired to tail the mysterious Betty Mayfield (Sarah Goldberg) all the way to the seaside town of Esmerelda, without knowing why or the identity of his employer. It’s not long before he realises that he’s not the only one on the trail, and that he too is being watched. Director Sasha Yevtushenko; producer Claire Grove.

And coming up later in 2011: The Long Goodbye, The High Window, The Little Sister, and Poodle Springs.

There’s a fascinating conversation between Raymond Chandler and Ian Fleming available over on BBC Archives. It was first broadcast on the BBC “Third Program” on July 10th, 1958. In it the two famed authors, and friends, discuss each others novels in depth. But before you head on over there, consider this |MP3| first. It is a repeat broadcast, from 1988, that includes an informative introduction that the BBC Archives version lacks.

Here’s the official BBC Archives description:

Fleming and Chandler talk about protagonists James Bond and Philip Marlowe in this conversation between two masters of their genre. They discuss heroes and villains, the relationship between author and character and the differences between the English and American thriller. Fleming contrasts the domestic ‘tea and muffins’ school of detective story with the American private eye tradition and Chandler guides Fleming through the modus operandi of a mafia hit while marvelling at the speed with which his fellow author turns out the latest Bond adventure.